Mompesson House

Mompesson House is a Queen Anne town house of 1701 in Salisbury's Cathedral Close, built for Charles Mompesson and given to the National Trust in 1952 by the architect Denis Martineau. Plasterwork, an oak staircase and period furniture fill rooms leased to a succession of families, and the house appeared in the 1995 film of Sense and Sensibility. The dining room holds the Turnbull collection, one of the finest displays of English 18th-century drinking glasses anywhere, and a walled garden of herbaceous borders and a pergola leads to a tea-room in the former summerhouse and a second-hand bookshop. A 1.25-mile walk around the Cathedral Close starts and ends at the house. Reviewers rate the volunteers' talks on the families who lived here as the best part of the visit, and like reading a bookshop find over cake in the garden. There is no parking at the house, so use the city pay and display or park and ride, and the ground floor and garden are level.